When Gyles Brandreth set out to find the secret of “How to be Happy” he started in Las Vegas and ended up in the psychiatrist’s chair.

“I’m fascinated by happiness: what it is, who gets it and how. It’s been a real journey,” he says.

“My two-decade search for happiness co-incided with having lost my father and my best friend. My sister died then my brother died; they were going down like flies around me.

"And I thought, here I am, the professional happy man with the colourful jumpers, turning up on TV grinning away in the jolly knitwear. I was annoyingly happy but inside it was a different story, so I started this search.”

After a lot of research and toil, with some fun along the way, Gyles has boiled it all down to seven secrets of happiness. There’s too much selfishness going around, he believes, too much focus on the individual.

“One of the things I learned was to avoid inward-looking and to get away from narcissism,” he says.

“Stop thinking about yourself. There are people going around taking pictures of themselves, a ‘selfie’, and sending them everywhere – well, this doesn’t make you happy.”

There is one rule of happiness that Gyles believes might override all others, and that’s ‘cultivating a passion’. “You have to have something you love doing.

"The Queen has a passion for horses and in June this year people saw her at Ascot when her horse won the Gold Cup, the first time the sovereign’s horse had won the race in 203 years.

"There was this picture of her looking overjoyed. You can easily see the people who don’t have a passion, from listless teenagers to the elderly just sitting around.”

Gyles has cultivated many passions in life, but connecting them all is his love of language.

“My father was a lawyer and my mother a teacher, so words were important to me as a child,” says Gyles.

“I learned to play Scrabble very young, and used to play it with an older gentleman who was the founder of my school.

"This gentleman died aged 102 and I played with him into his 90s. Incredibly, he had been a friend of Oscar Wilde’s! He would use these words that were arcane and obsolete but he’d say that they were current when he learned them.”

It would be something of an understatement to say that Gyles Brandreth has had a varied life.

The former Conservative MP for Chester is known for sporting colourful jumpers on Countdown, being a regular on Radio 4 shows such as Just A Minute, writing a series of murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde as his sleuth, and founding the Teddy Bear Museum in Stratford-upon-Avon.

He was a previous European Monopoly Champion and is a roving reporter on The One Show. His love of words and wordplay can be traced back to his schooldays.

I had a wonderful English teacher and my favourite books then were the Sherlock Holmes novels.

"I read the complete works of Shakespeare at the age of ten or 11 – I couldn’t have understood much of it, but I had fallen in love with language. Language is power.

"As someone once said, ‘no matter how eloquently a dog may bark, it cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.’ Only language can do that.”

Gyles Brandreth will be at King’s Hall, Ilkley on Saturday, November 30. For tickets ring (01274) 432000.